AMD show­ing signs of life on the graph­ics side

AMD launches af­ford­able A8-7670K APU for gam­ing PCs built on a bud­get

Af­ter a long pe­riod of sta­tus quo, AMD is show­ing signs of life on the graph­ics side with the Radeon R9 Fury and Fury X and the new Radeon R300-se­ries. The com­pany’s still in come­back mode when it comes to com­puter pro­ces­sors, though, af­ter a re­cently slug­gish PC mar­ket re­sulted in lower APU sales.

Hop­ing to de­liver another punch against In­tel’s Core i3 line – and just in time for Win­dows 10 – AMD re­cently an­nounced the quad-core A8-7670K desk­top APU.

Sim­i­lar to the A10-7870K that showed up in May, the A8 pro­ces­sor is aimed at bud­get PC builders look­ing to get their game on for a low price. The A8-7670K has a base clock of 3.6GHz com­pared to 3.9GHz on the 7870K; it’s also a lit­tle slower on the GPU side, run­ning at 757MHz com­pared to 866MHz on its A10 coun­ter­part. The A8-7670K is also run­ning with two fewer GPU cores – six, com­pared to eight on the A10-7870K.

Be­yond the ba­sic specs, the A8 fea­tures most of the good­ies you’d like to see in a mod­ern chip such as Vir­tual Su­per Res­o­lu­tion, and AMD’s FreeSync fea­ture that lets graph­ics pro­ces­sors and com­pat­i­ble dis­plays sync their re­fresh rates.

That FreeSync sup­port may wind up be­ing im­por­tant. AMD ex­pects many cur­rent games to run around 30 frames per sec­ond at 1080p with the A8-7670K’s in­te­grated Radeon graph­ics pro­ces­sors, such as League of Le­gends, He­roes of the Storm, and Dota 2.

Now, 30fps is a far cry from the PC gam­ing gold stan­dard of 60fps, and is con­sid­er­ably poorer than the 49fps AMD was claim­ing for the 7870K run­ning Dota 2. Nev­er­the­less, it’s still at the bot­tom end of playable, and FreeSync may be able to squeeze a lit­tle more smooth­ness out of your typ­i­cal 30fps ex­pe­ri­ence if you pick up a dis­play with a vari­able re­fresh rate that sup­ports fram­er­ates that low.

If you have a setup and are think­ing about try­ing to drop in the A8-7670K, it’ll fit the FM2+ socket just like the A10-7870K.